Technical expertise is very rarely where the core value of a product comes from. If you're really pushing some boundary and just have a better technology product, like original Google or ChatGPT, then sure, tech is your special sauce.
For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.
Its hard to build a well-architected web app that scales, but theres many people who can do a reasonable job at it. But translating that to business value is much harder.
Theres many people can build a React project in a week, fewer who know how to turn that React project into money. That should be self-evident on a site full of people who know how to make a React app, but begrudglingly work for others because they dont know how to turn a React app into money.
The thing about "the business guys" is most of them are actually pretty bad at the business side. And a lot of developers are actually better at the business side, because they have more relevant experience.
The "business guys" get their MBA and learn about merges and acquisitions for billion dollar business and do case studies about how GM optimizes their supply chain, information that's useful in some contexts but mostly entirely useless when it comes to getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS.
The developer is actually more likely to have the relevant business skills since they're more likely to have put some sort of SaaS on the internet and tried to get users for it, even if they failed.
I was on YC cofounder matchmaking for a while and was inundated with "business guys" who were just bad at the business side. It didn't bug me that they were non-technical, but their non-technical nature led to some bad business planning. For example, one guy who worked in VC wanted to make a GMail / Superhuman competitor oriented towards VCs. I suggested we start with a Chrome extension for Gmail, he insisted we build an entirely new email stack from scratch for the MVP.
Making a realistic plan is part of making a business plan and his lack of technical acumen made him bad at business.
If someone came to me and said, hey I have a super pared down MVP, it's just 4 screens in Figma with a minimal data model, and I have 100 people who I showed the Figma screens to and they signed up to pay $50 a month, can you build it ? I'd be thrilled to pair up with a "business guy" like that but they are far more rare than a good tech co-founder and the business types that get that far tend to offer things like "founding engineer" instead of actual co-founder because they, somewhat fairly, assume that the skills you're bringing to the table aren't actually that difficult to find.
But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule".
"But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule"."
As an ex-shitty business guy, I taught myself how to code thinking that would solve my problems. Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm not lecturing anyone having learned from success but having learned from failure.
I just spent an entire year spent building software products and they almost all failed. I wrote a long retro (too long, not edited, more for myself than for others, but if curious: https://www.billprin.com/notes/one-year-retro ) and the #1 cause of failure I wrote down was not doing enough talking to customers and customer development.
The one project I have that has a tiny bit of recurring revenue was not originally a project I had set out to build. I cold-DMed some people in a Facebook group and pitched a different project, and one guy told me he didn't like what I built but might pay if I built something different in the same space. And that was the only product I have thats worked. Goes to show the obvious - talk to users!
I see a lot of indie hackers talk about "audience building", and my initial read of that the purpose was that if you get a ton of followers on Twitter, then when you launch a product, you have a bunch of people ready to sign up. Increasingly, I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.
So yeah, customer development is not some magical thing that requires you to be a "business guy" or anything else, but it's hard, it's important, and sounds like we both need to do more of it :)
> Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.
This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier. And one day the switch will happen, they will look up to you as the knowledgeable consultant instead of looking down on you as the 'shitty business guy' with nothing of value to offer.
> This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier.
Thanks! I launched my first large-scale cold outreach campaign this morning after learning about it this week and building up leads. Tomorrow, I will try out cold calling.
>> For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.
I STRONGLY disgree with your take as a universal take. At the pre-Seed stage, the technology is the only thing. Without that, you dont have a technical business. You just have a pitch deck.
Of course, once you prove out the idea and reach product market fit, that enables you to either have cashflow or raise funding -- so technology becomes less critical because you can use the $ to hire technologists.
If "mapping market demand to technical products" was really the money printer, every management consultant would be running a unicorn. Every MBB consultant would have a side startup. You actually need the technical product, or some MVP of it, to map a market demand to it, to do demos, to raise funding. If you dont, you just have a pitch deck. Sure, if you can raise on a pitch deck, that is winning, but how many can?
A pitch deck is something you make for investors. I'm not talking about investors, I'm talking about customers.
Lots of management consultants can make a pitch deck. Very few can actually find people willing to pay for an MVP of a software product.
That was pretty much the point of my post. Most "business" guys are bad at the business side. Making pitch decks and raising funds is not the business side - except in some people's little side-circus. Understanding what customers want and figuring out what's the minimal version that people will pay for is.
You show me a management consultant that actually has 50 people willing to pay for an MVP, and that person can easily have a side startup. In fact, please put me in touch. Very, very few of them can actually do that. And even if they don't have a developer, I imagine an investor would be pretty impressed by that too.
Again, I'm speaking in generalities. If your technology is "turn common trash into gasoline" or "teleports people across contintents safely", then yeah, you don't need many business skills. But if your technology is "a scalable web app", or "I forked stable diffusion and did something cute with it", then the business skills are more critical than the tech skills.
It somewhat depends on the product, but in the beginning, I think the tech only matters inasmuch as it allows you to iterate quickly and build a product people love. It can be a spaghetti code tire fire underneath.
What really matters is market insight to understand what people want, design ability to give it to them, and sales/marketing to get traction. You do need a good engineer to pull this off, but they need to prioritize iteration speed, not engineering quality.
> The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys".
I think you're underplaying the ability to map requirements to a feasible and sufficient technical product. Being the person who is also mapping the market demand to the technical product makes this process significantly more efficient.
I also think there's a lot of overlap with Software Engineering (with a capital 'E') in these skills - a lot of this is about figuring out what to build and making sure you've built it. I believe that's why they're more often found in developers than business types.
I want to say (as GP) good points. Thank you for disagreeing. When I think of the business, my worldview underweights the cases (the 99%?) where technology is only an enabler to the business case - I guess because I don't think it's as interesting as the pushing of boundaries.
If you’re required to install software on your phone for work then your employer should be legally required to pay for your phone. And then if you want your own phone you pay for it yourself. And if your employers IT team lets corporate devices get malware that’s on them. This is a weird edge case to get hung up on.
You’re making a very simple issue way more complicated than it needs to be. Having Apple spin out EU specific new corporate entities with unclear relationships to its parent company sounds extremely complex.
Requiring Apple to allow people to install apps they want on their own device is pretty simple and should be a fundamental expectation of a free society.
If normal user wants the walled garden Apple experience, that’s fine. Make it unintuitive to install third party apps. Require checking a big red disclaimer that you might brick your phone. But just have some sort of path where if party A made an app and party B wants it on the device they paid a lot of money for, they can do that without some unqualified drone in Cupertino blocking it .
Countless examples of the App Store review being broken , and just on principle, Apple has what’s effectively a monopoly on mobile phones in that you can’t make a mobile app and ignore iPhone and for them to unilaterally decide all software that’s allowed is way too much power.
Somehow Microsoft went to the Supreme Court for putting IE on the desktop but Apple is off the hook for a complete lockdown. At least you could download Netscape on Windows 95! What Apple is doing is like if AOL and AOL keywords became the only entry point to the web. Then you go on Hacker News and people say that’s s good thing because AOL only allows quality websites and otherwise people make malware and scam websites. It doesn’t matter, it’s too much power for one company and mobile phones are more critical to society in 2023 than the web was in the 90s. Mobile phones are not appliances.
It’s still unfathomable to me this is even a conversation on this website. Apples complete lockdown of the most important computing devices is plainly bad for consumers and society.
I'm making a pretty valid point(note Android's outsized malware share) and we'll get to see it play out next year in the EU.
It's interesting to me that your core argument is about making a choice whether or not to embrace side-loading and 3rd party app stores. However aren't users making this choice when they buy the phone to begin with. Side loading and 3rd party app stores aren't a secret, many Android manufacturers use this as a selling point and include their own stores baked-in.
I'm somehow to believe that users are simultaneously clever and dumb - and I'm not buying it.
I like how you call users dumb for choosing Apple and clever for wanting to sideload.
Or how else do you claim there is two sides here?
Pretending that Apple is protecting consumers is silly, they have repeatedly said internally the lock is for revenue alone. No claim of security protection has lasted past "wouldn't sideloaded apps be sandboxed the same as App Store apps and thus have the same security overall"? (Apple failed to counter that point)
Poking fun at the bad phrase. There was no dumb in that choice.
The reality is the author dismissed Apple supporting side loading as fundamentally impossible in a thread talking about how Apple should offer more choices.
Calling users dumb for wanting side loading on Apple is ridiculous on its face. Users didn't choose Apple to side load they might have sacrificed side loading to get Apple but calling them dumb for making a choice is ridiculous.
Apple makes $86 billion from the App Store a year. That is a quarter of their revenue from iPhone sales. No shot a 25% increase in revenue with phenomenally higher margins isn't of extreme importance to Apple.
This guy is a dangerous zealot. He attacked your "reading comprehension" because he doesn't have any real argument that is not about protecting their trillion dollars master no matter what.
It's a bit unreal seeing people like him exist everywhere.
It sounds like the poster means that people who buy one or the other are choosing between either "(nearly) absolute" security or freedom in being able to install software without the manufacturer's consent.
Certainly but there is no dumb option it is a trade off.
They got in their head that users were stupid for choosing Apple when they wanted side loading but that isn't stupid in the context of "should Apple allow sideloading".
> If you’re required to install software on your phone for work then your employer should be legally required to pay for your phone. And then if you want your own phone you pay for it yourself. And if your employers IT team lets corporate devices get malware that’s on them. This is a weird edge case to get hung up on.
I'll support any sideloading regulation that includes all of these protections. As it stands this is only a law in some countries/regions and certainly not something everyone will be protected by if they happen to be outside of EU (and maybe US) jurisdiction.
Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places.
I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.
Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level.
Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%).
I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic:
www.livepokertheory.com
There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!
Hello fellow HN'er! I am PioSolver author and thanks for mentioning my software as a turning point in poker theory evolution. Feel free to pm me (by Pio email or Discord). While I am no longer involved much in the poker world it's always nice to keep in touch with people doing interesting things in and around the industry!
Author of the post here. Your software is literally the reason I made any money in Poker. Must have studied using your software for more than a 1000hrs haha.
Yes, live poker is still pretty soft, and since the players are worse, your winrate and edge should be better. But then again, I'm not sure you can get enough hands/hour to be as profitable as an online player--everything is just so much slower. You could have a year long downswing live where, if that happened online you are probably just a losing player. So you need to spend all your time at the casinos. You can't make a living grinding home games even if your edge there is astronomical.
Just my viewpoint as a solidly recreational player. Although I'm a decently profitable cash player (I donk my cash winnings away by losing tournaments), I'm not good enough to go pro online and I'm not patient enough or willing to spend my life in the casino to go pro live.
Well, there's obvious problems with online, starting with that it's technically illegal and unregulated in most US states, which is a pretty big one. Secondly, the rise of solvers and other AI have greatly increased the risk of your opponents using them to beat you (RTA aka real-time assistance). Besides that, many other forms of software assistance such as HUDs and database datamining were pretty much always accepted so if you don't want to do those things you're at a disadvantage. There's also serious risk of collusion , team play, card sharing, doubly so on unregulated sites.
It's hard to overstate the difference in skill between online and live. You see VERY weak players buying into games with $5k stacks live while online games with $200 buyins are considered very tough. Even regular players in high stakes live games make surprisingly fundamental mistakes, like checking back extremely strong hands on the river rather than betting them for value, or almost never bluffing.
I would say that if someone plays poker 20+ hours a week and has a losing year live they are also probably just a losing player. I'm friends with many live poker pros, and I've never heard of any of them having losing years. Obviously they pick games they know they can beat and mostly stick to them.
Tournament variance is extremely high and I think being a live tournament pro is unnecessarily risky unless you sell / swap action which most pros do. Or pray you run good and win one. But cash is a safer bet.
As far as spending all your time in a casino in order to make a living, that's basically the equivalent of spending all your time in an office, it's a job and you go to it. It certainly can be grindy. I understand it's not for everyone. But it's not super far removed from many other in-person jobs. And as others have said, it can actually be nicer than staring at a screen 10 hours a day, especially staring at a screen to play poker, because it has the social aspect with the other players and the dealers, the tactile aspect of the chips and the cards, etc.
I'm not advocating for anyone to become a live poker pro, certainly I'm sharing my project on hacker news with the hope that some "serious recreational" players take interest in it since very few poker pros lurk here. Most people should not play pro poker for various reasons - on Hacker News the obvious one being they can almost certainly make more money and easier money with plain software engineering, software engineering is generally more intellectually engaging, and also most people aren't mentally equipped to deal with the swings.
I'm mostly doing it currently because it's a niche that I understand well having done it in the past, and I wanted to do an indie software project and "make money playing poker to reduce my burn rate while building a poker blog and training app" has a natural synergy to it as an entry point into bootstrapped software entrepreneurship. Plus so far its my best received project, has a small but growing audience and respectable retention on the app despite it being an MVP.
Moreso than advocating people become live poker pros, I'm just noting that basically anyone who wants to can win a bunch of money at poker, if they're willing to study the massive amount of resources that exist now. Those resources always existed but the advent of solvers has changed those resources from "these are very good heuristics beating the games" to "this is the solution to the game under certain constraints".
Based on experience talking to "hacker news" type people, they tend to be introverted and so would strongly prefer the nature of online poker rather than casino poker, but I would again warn people that online games are both far tougher and require a lot of extra tooling and precautions that aren't necessary in a casino game.
Plus, at some point, in live poker, you get to put all the solver nonsense away and just look a man in the eye and decide if he's bluffing you or not :)
Thank you for this long response! I agree with basically everything you said, but still push back about the downswings. Think longer time horizons. I think anyone who's played 20+ years, even very profitable players, has almost certainly had at least one net-negative year. That's just poker. I don't really socialize with any live pros though. If you know live players who have never had a single down year, please let me know so I can stay far away from their tables.
It's incredible how tough online play has gotten, so quickly. Back in 2000-2004 you could literally not know how to play poker and still make money online. Now, I know I'd get absolutely smoked joining a mid-stakes online $1/$2 game. I'm not sure how much of this is assistance and HUDs. There seems to be just a different breed of players online.
It's going to be obvious to other players that you're wearing a camera, and who would want to stay in a game where it looks like another person is cheating?
Making other players leave seems like it would be the fastest way to get yourself a lifetime ban to your local casinos.
(that's even ignoring the fact the casinos have already seen every trick in the book already, and will be onto you immediately)
Yet multiple times I’ve seen people on this site defend Apples approval process as a good thing since they get such a great curated experience as a consumer. But here’s the thing - you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it. If this persons idea was for iPhone instead of macOS it would never benefit those thousands of users that it did.
And - I’m going to put this bluntly while trying not to be too rude - Apple does not assign the best of the best to their App Store approval process. The experience is rife with reviewers who seem to have never looked at your app and are incapable of communicating in English outside the scope of auto form responses. Imagine the worst call center experience you’ve ever had as a customer - now you get that experience after having put hundreds or thousands of hours into a project and in some cases , a business of yours. And your concerns are a speck of dust to this trillion dollar company.
And let’s be real - you can’t seriously make a mobile app and ignore iPhones. It’s not a pure monopoly but they effectively have the leverage of one.
It’s unimaginable to me that on a site called hacker news I would see support for such incredibly antagonistic behavior towards developers that Apple exhibits but unfortunately I have multiple times so I hope this persons brilliant keyboard app that has helped so many people serves as one of the many many examples as to how Apples broken App Store process hurts developers and hurts consumers and benefits absolutely nobody.
I haven’t even touched upon the fact that you have to pay $99/year and THIRTY percent of revenue for the privilege of this experience.
The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp.
We are so lucky that European regulators have some sense here.
> "you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it."
I saw the Cydia store, I see the Google Play store, I see the Microsoft Windows store, I see the internet outside the stores and all the software offerings on the web and on GitHub and Sourceforge and all the rest. What makes you think there's some secret buried treasure of high quality apps and not an overwhelming noise of 99% crud? And no, one example of a good program doesn't refute this, this is not a claim that there are zero good programs outside the app store (or even that there are 100% good programs inside it), this is a claim that removing moderation would be like removing the walls of your house in winter - how dare you try to keep the heat in and the cold out when I know of some warm places outside; the majority of places outside are cold.
This is like wishing for unmoderated blog comments; I like this blog[1] but see how long the scrollbar is, scroll down until the original sensible comments turn into spam. Yes there may be a good comment lost in anti-spam moderation systems, but getting rid of them is worse.
> The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp.
Right now Apple has an effective monopoly on the software that can run on its machines, especially the iPhone which is extraordinarily difficult to install non-appstore software on. I don't understand why that's considered acceptable when we once pilloried microsoft for having internet explorer be uninstallable. In that case you could at least still install whatever other browser you wanted... (obviously software being uninstallable is also bad)
> What makes you think there's some secret buried treasure of high quality apps and not an overwhelming noise of 99% crud?
This could be because of the barrier to entry to getting software onto the platform. I don't really face this problem with other platforms, such as Android or Linux. Maybe because I have my own curation process though, which brings me to my final point:
If 3rd party app stores were mandated, not only does that allow users to install the software of their choice on the computers they purchased, it also allows competitive markets. Apple right now can (and might?) pull an Amazon and promote their own products/software over others' because they own the market and the algos that run the search on the market. They can prop up their partners, and they can charge whatever markup they please to be listed in their curated experience.
3rd party markets means new algos representing different needs without daddy Apple getting say-so. F-droid is a great example. The various marketplaces for linux software is another: Ubuntu's official repositories, Arch's, etc, with offramps in the form of AUR or just compiling software on your own that you find on your favorite search engine or forum if you're so inclined.
Apple's app store is monopolistic behavior, plain and simple. You can love it, you can have it, it's actually quite fine imo for there to be an official software repo, but there must be an offramp to enforce user freedom.
The Cydia store was good and had amazing, high quality apps and tweaks, and the other two examples you mention are walled gardens curated by companies who have historically amplified bad actors rather than stifle them.
There is a need for curation, but I don't think Apple is qualified to perform the kind of curation that is best for consumers, it is both so loose as to permit an app store mostly filled with useless garbage, a great deal of which they promote on the "curated" home page ( to-do lists, mrbeast unity game, financial management tools that simply exist to bait consumers into enabling bank api access) and so tight as to stifle the creativity of those who think outside the narrow box of the monotony that is popular on their app store.
Curation is necessary and valuable, but distribution and curation aren't the same, and as the examples you cited, and Appls's app store reveal, the motivations of curator and distributor are in a fundamental tension between maximizing sales and improving the experience of the customer.
And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish.
> "And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish."
Oh pulleeease, you're a superior "hunter" to the "infants" who use vendor curated app stores? Can you hear yourself regurgitating this embarassing Alpha Male/Ayn Randian drivel? It's software not manliness gym-bro posturing world. The experience of picking quality software from the large volume of total software isn't "powerful hunter" it's panning for gold - sifting a ton of river silt for hopefully a few flecks of gold, or being a filtration feeding sea creature, swallowing litres of seawater for a few morsels of sustainance.
You have freedom with Android, Chromebook, PinePhone, Windows, Linux. You covet iPhone and macOS because they're so obviously better people will spend two, three, four times the money to avoid the alternatives but then you want to break them and make them as bad as the alternatives? What about the principle of being able to, even to your own harm, choose to buy and use a restricted, limited device? The freedom to avoid having to be a human spam-filter, the freedom to make and sell restricted devices that people can opt-in to buying?
Ayn Rand? LOL, play your comic book political fantasies to another crowd, there is no marketplace here. There are two companies that have behaved monopolistically, using illegal means to crush all competition, and now lay flat on their backs and shriek bloody murder when weak Western regulators even sniff at reminding them of what they need to do to at least maintain the illusion of a "fair" marketplace. And for the sake of.... what in your estimation is high quality curation? (TikTok, Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja) In what sense is having the same 5 timewasting apps on the homepage for over a decade curation? Don't you imagine that a 'curator' would promote a diverse array of the high quality content and tools that are available on their platform?
You seem incapable of conceiving of a way of life outside of that of the consumer, sitting around waiting for a bit of gold to fall into your hands. Others are out there trying to build things, some of which are interesting, and most of which are miserable failures. And in the world that I want to live in, and in the world that Western democracies have built empires on the promise of, individuals and collectives ought to be able to attempt to do so without having to crash into the infinite fields of iron gates erected by the ~12 megacorporations that collectively have a stranglehold on >90% of every market for >90% of goods.
I am not interested in whatever male fantasies of individual struggle that you are seeing projected onto the foreheads of others, we should not deny a generation their collective and individual rights to self-determination by failing to see that we've created a world where digital life is a prerequisite for living, and our governments have protected a small number of aristocrats set on binding the digital lives of human beings to enrich themselves.
The missing out is real, but it is still a tradeoff. I’d prefer the world where we could have both all the reasonable apps and no spyware/pii-ransomware nonsense in app stores. But we only have this one and have to share it. You don’t see it as a tradeoff, that’s okay. But voting to ruin the experience that people actually liked for decades… that’s hard to understand.
> ...a legal mandate to allow third party app stores.
My proposal is a bit more, um, simple:
Apple's App Store must be spun off and operated as an entirely separate entity. Maybe even run as a nonprofit org.
I cannot abide by markets also competing with their own vendors. Apple cannot both run the App Store and sell its own apps on it. They must pick a lane and stick to it.
Ditto Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc. Amazon can be an e-commerce site or sell Amazon Basic (etc), but not both.
Said another way: No vertically integrated monopolies. Dominate one market, by default or by design, fine (sort of). But using that domination to enter and dominate other markets, adjacent or otherwise, is not allowed.
I think your suggestion is kinda based, but it's definitely not more simple, as it would require targeting a single company and enforcing a monopoly action against it to force it to split up. I believe the last time that happened in the USA was 1982 when Bell System was broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Meanwhile a legal mandate to allow third party app stores can be accomplished more simply (imo) similar to how the EU forced Apple to use USB-C: market directives.
Let's be honest, there's probably a dozen antitrust actions that are overdue in the US tech sector, and since the US doj has ignored that issue for so long, it now probably needs to be done the Standard Oil way, with a hacksaw. Of course it's not going to be easy, but the current situation happens because for 4 decades the US has taken the easy way, or done nothing at all.
As for simplicity, it lies in the fact that lighter actions often don't produce enough effect, can be side-stepped or simply ignored without continuous oversight. On the other hand, when you force divestment and bust corporate control, it is much easier to guarantee that the desired effect happens.
I am a strong believer in spaced repetition. My current primary focus is building a spaced repetition platform for learning poker solver solutions with the aim of winning money at live poker games ( www.livepokertheory.com ) . The motivation for the project is just to work on an indie hacker project that self-funds itself since I use my own tool to make money. My app is not based on Anki since , besides wanting to independently monetize my work , I also wanted to build a poker-centric UX for it.
Now, within the poker community there is an idea that “GTO robots” (players who memorize game-theory equilibrium solutions produced by solver software) are inferior to intuitive players who exploit their opponents mistakes rather than play an equilibrium strategy which is suboptimal vs a non optimal opponent. For example, a GTO strategy will bluff very aggressively which is not good against opponents that never or rarely fold. Especially GTO play is criticized in live games where there is other info such as opponent “tells” such as shaking hands when making bets.
But it’s a false dichotomy as I believe studying equilibrium gives you a strong baseline understanding of the mechanics and in live play you can still listen to your gut and make adjustments.
The OP talks about math and I’m talking about poker but I’ve seen this concept discussed in a few other places. Basically, some education systems way overindex on rote memorization. And just rote memorization is a really bad way to learn and understand since you miss high level reasoning, problem solving, and abstraction. But some rote memorization can be good as a foundation for abstraction. I’ve seen some studies suggest people who can do arithmetic and basic algebra more quickly can do higher level proofs more effectively. They are less “bogged down” with low level mechanics when doing higher level thinking. Musicians who want to creatively and improvisationally “jam out” might still drill scales to build that low level technique to unlock the high level creativity on top of it.
And within learning and memorization, spaces repetition works really well. It matches something with our brain chemistry to review mostly new stuff but occasionally review old stuff that might be fading, it’s the right mix of novelty and preventing forgetting. Anki is heavily associated with flash cards for language learning Vocab and MCAT test prep so nice to see some others exploring it’s possibilities outside of that.
“But some rote memorization can be good as a foundation for abstraction. I’ve seen some studies suggest people who can do arithmetic and basic algebra more quickly can do higher level proofs more effectively. They are less “bogged down” with low level mechanics when doing higher level thinking. Musicians who want to creatively and improvisationally “jam out” might still drill scales to build that low level technique to unlock the high level creativity on top of it.”
I personally find this to be true. I became significantly better at higher math and physics after I memorized and drilled on lower level concepts and algebraic/trigonometric manipulations.
I have a 2 year old daughter and even though I intuitively know it's important to set a good example, I've already been shocked to the extent this is true.
My daughter loves grabbing our phones and watching whatever she can pull up on them, dialing people. If you take it away she gets upset. At first I was thinking, wow phones are very addictive on a primal level, she's addicted to just the flashy screens.
I think the flashy screen being tempting might be a little true, but then I came to a different conclusion about why she was so fascinated with the phone.
I noticed she also "changes" her stuffed animals diaper including pretending to apply rash cream, pretends to read books laying around she's seen me read, fidgets with the same household items she's seen me fidget with. That's when I realized what may be obvious to people experienced with kids - they constantly imitate the adults in their lives.
So my daughter was probably obsessed with staring at a phone because she saw her parents obsessed with staring at their phones and wanted to imitate them.
Of course this may be more relevant for very young kids moreso than teenagers, where the smart phone addictions work at a higher more cognitive level. But it did drill home the message that our children can be a reflection of ourselves so if you want to improve their lives, improve your own.
Kids aren't addicted to the flashy screen first. The first order issue is they want to be like you. That want to be like you soooo much. With every fiber of their being.
Nah, they're super enticed by it. For the first two years of my kids life, we had no screens in the house that he ever saw. We had old Nokia brick phones, no TV, and we only used a computer when he was sleeping.
Regardless, the moment he saw an iPad in the library, he wanted to stare at it and fiddle with it for an hour. Even to the point of completing ignoring the model train set which he loves.
Considering the scale interpretation differences, it would be impossible for a child to not be enamoured with an iPad. Like us seeing a giant sized 4k screen for the first time, except even better for them since they can walk around with their portable giant screen!
Today's devices and apps are designed to be addictive in a way that my old Commodore wasn't. Of course it was designed to be appealing, I don't deny that. But I doubt that ProTracker or Sensible Soccer had marketing teams focused on maximising "screen time".
The point of the post I replied to was that kids are attracted to tech because they see the parents absorbed in it. I don't think this is the main reason.
The way the commodore 64 was so addictive even while not being designed to do so helps prove that point. Most of our parents thought we were wasting our time and should read a book or watch TV depending on the parent in question. Of course we didn't. In fact those other things were more time wasting IMO. We were learning to create.
That this obsession turned into great careers and changed the world (sadly not always for the better as you describe!) was overlooked back then.
But kids just love tech just like they love rockets and dinosaurs, they don't need their parents setting the example.
Definitely. My children loved phones even at an age where they couldn't care less about the screen.
I pictured it in my mind like the 2001 monoliths -- these black rectangular things that hold all of the knowledge, and around which all sorts of social behaviour arise. Of course they're fascinating!
I built a website that was super simple using server side rendering using Django. Then I got a bunch of feature requests that made it less simple and the client-side javascript started getting crazy spaghetti code.
I actually somewhat knew React before this project but besides not wanting to overcomplicate things I was hesitant because I didn't like pure client-side rendering. Then I learned NextJS makes it easy to mix/match client-side rendering and server-side rendering so I just switched to that.
So now, even for a simple website, I'll probably start with React because I don't want to dig myself into a needless hole.
And yes that post upset some people who thought I should use htmx, but React is actually pretty easy and simple. Now most of my websites are React because I know it so it's easy and simple to use what you're used to.
Also, "I did it in React because that's the way it's done" isn't the worst reason because you benefit from that popularity, e.g. some library you need will have clear examples of integrating with React.
I think the frontend and JS community have certainly gone off some crazy rails at points, but I also think there's a popular sentiment on HN exaggerating how off-the-rails things have gone, usually expressed by people who don't actually develop many modern-looking websites. Most of the trends have gotten popular for somewhat rational reasons, and even that stuff that has gotten a little crazy like an explosion in dependencies, is really just about tradeoffs e.g. lots of dependencies cause lots of problems but also enable code re-use so it has pros and cons.
Software engineering isn't a hard science, it's impossible to be 100% certain in one of these debates. You could be right and I could be wrong.
But I've been doing this for a long time, and that's what everyone says. I've heard this argument at least 100 times when someone is trying to defend their decision to build something overcomplicated. The number of times they ended up actually being justified is so small that I'm very suspicious of this argument.
I’ve had the same experience of going fully server rendered to keep complexity down and ending up with having to turn down requests for more interactivity to prevent the code from turning into a spaghetti mess. Maybe not necessarily a bad thing to have less interactivity but it’s definitely a trade off to be very aware of.
I really enjoyed your blog post! (You have a broken link to a time zone post, FYI.)
If you're not expecting to need fancy client side stuff, does next.js give you as good a server side development experience as Django/Rails/Laravel? At that point, it would seem worth it "just in case", as you suggest, but in the past when I looked at it, the SSR stuff still felt a little cobbled together and experimental. I would love to hear from someone with firsthand experience switching, though!
Thanks for the kind words and the heads up on the broken link.
I think Next has a great DevEx, but I'm just using it for some projects as a solo dev without a ton of traffic so perhaps there's some rough corners I haven't experienced yet.
I do think they are going down some risky paths where they do things like rewrite your code files depending on whether you're on server or client, and in general with "framework-defined infrastructure" where if you write certain functions the framework "knows" that it's supposed to be on the server or in a background job or whatever. But so far I've gotten the benefits without the drawbacks, though I might be jynxing myself.
Not a successful self-funded entrepreneur but Im working on it and I’ve studied a lot of the greats.
DHH and Jason Fried blog and books like Rework
Arvid Kahl is a successful software bootstrapper and has a few great books and a bootstrapper newsletter
Everything by Rob Walling is focused on software bootstrappers, and his associates brands / YouTube channel, Microconf community etc
Indie Hackers podcast , interviews, and website
Founders at Work is written by a YC founder but ironically had lots of bootstrapped interviews like Craigslist and Joel Spolsky (Trello)
Patio11 blog is classic
MJ Demarco is non tech and writes more “motivational” style books about bootstrapped entrepreneurship
Once you go down this rabbit hole you’ll discover many more . Especially since bootstrappers love making content about their experiences as it’s marketing and potentially more revenue (what DHH calls “selling your byproducts”)
For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.
Its hard to build a well-architected web app that scales, but theres many people who can do a reasonable job at it. But translating that to business value is much harder.
Theres many people can build a React project in a week, fewer who know how to turn that React project into money. That should be self-evident on a site full of people who know how to make a React app, but begrudglingly work for others because they dont know how to turn a React app into money.
The thing about "the business guys" is most of them are actually pretty bad at the business side. And a lot of developers are actually better at the business side, because they have more relevant experience.
The "business guys" get their MBA and learn about merges and acquisitions for billion dollar business and do case studies about how GM optimizes their supply chain, information that's useful in some contexts but mostly entirely useless when it comes to getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS.
The developer is actually more likely to have the relevant business skills since they're more likely to have put some sort of SaaS on the internet and tried to get users for it, even if they failed.
I was on YC cofounder matchmaking for a while and was inundated with "business guys" who were just bad at the business side. It didn't bug me that they were non-technical, but their non-technical nature led to some bad business planning. For example, one guy who worked in VC wanted to make a GMail / Superhuman competitor oriented towards VCs. I suggested we start with a Chrome extension for Gmail, he insisted we build an entirely new email stack from scratch for the MVP.
Making a realistic plan is part of making a business plan and his lack of technical acumen made him bad at business.
If someone came to me and said, hey I have a super pared down MVP, it's just 4 screens in Figma with a minimal data model, and I have 100 people who I showed the Figma screens to and they signed up to pay $50 a month, can you build it ? I'd be thrilled to pair up with a "business guy" like that but they are far more rare than a good tech co-founder and the business types that get that far tend to offer things like "founding engineer" instead of actual co-founder because they, somewhat fairly, assume that the skills you're bringing to the table aren't actually that difficult to find.
But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule".